Gwen 6: Aftermath

The next day, Ted appeared with Bev and a few geeks from the boards, and soon we were all traipsing around the park in drag...er...costume. I had the crossbow slung across my back, and Ted had some kind of big sword, while Bev was dressed as some sort of gypsy fortuneteller and the others were dressed as, well, other geeks. Dee was nowhere around. Everyone took care not to mention it.

Ted didn't really have much to say around the others, but eventually he concocted a mission to get away and told me the juicy bits. He'd gone to meet Gwen, who in retrospect was probably already under suspicion from her father, and somehow old Dad had discovered the situation (whether it was in flagrante delicto or not, I never knew). This resulted in Dad making the phone call to Ted's wife, which allowed me to dodge a very serious bullet w/r/t Ted's wife. Which he probably deserved, albeit with some other, similarly guilty person playing the role of cuckolder.

The upshot was that Dee had gone absolutely emotional batshit on him when he slunk in the door at 1am, which isn't surprising or unreasonable. They'd stayed up all night talking and fighting, and at the end they agreed to stay married if he promised never to speak with Gwen again. Thus, he had to make The Phone Call, no doubt with Dee looking on, after no sleep, and with the rest of my sewing still to do.

"But," he said cheerfully, "it's over with now. We can move on!"

"Great," I thought. "you'd have married her first, huh?"

The rest of the day I spent talking to Bev. She was quite a character, and just naturally assumed a mothering role over everyone, Ted included. We talked a lot about my incipient departure from college, and she was quite encouraging about it, which was in direct opposition to everything I'd heard from everyone else. I decided I liked her.

Around sunset, we split up. I promised Ted I'd call, and never did. Upon my arrival in my dorm room, my phone was ringing. It was Gwen, and I wasn't shocked to hear her crying.

The conversation was the first I'd had with her that was unmarred by hangups, hurried whispers, or other discouragements. Unfortunately, it wasn't a happy conversation. Her father was kicking her out of the house, for "destroying the honor of her family." No shit, that's exactly the words she used. Her mother was trying to intervene, Gwen said, but for the time being she was stuck on a pay phone at the Braum's in which we'd met a couple of months before. I did my best to reassure her that things would be OK, and that her father was being unreasonable but would probably calm down.

"If he doesn't," she sniffled, "what am I going to do? I don't have any place to go!"

"You can stay here, in my dorm room," I replied, without a second thought. She brightened up some.

"Really?"

"Yeah, no problem. I can hide you here, and when I leave here, you're welcome to stay wherever I wind up."

"But...you have a girlfriend!"

"True, but she's just going to have to understand the situation," I said, thinking to myself that Mary understanding why I was hiding an incredibly beautiful seventeen year old girl in a dorm room with one bed was about as likely as my mother understanding my reasons for leaving school.

She cried a bit more, but the worst appeared to be over. She seemed mollified that she had some place to go, and between sniffles she began to ask little silly questions about where we'd run off to and how we'd live. I didn't pay too much attention, but in retrospect I realize that what we were doing, despite the gravity of her current situation, was flirting. What the hell, I thought, I hadn't planned on taking Mary with me anyway.

The next day I got a call from Gwen, telling me she was back at home, and while her father wasn't speaking to her, it looked like she was at least going to graduate from high school with her parents in attendance. We chatted amiably for a while, and she extracted a promise from me that I would call her once I got set up in a new apartment.